“But other people can hear you, can’t they?”
Dawn looked like she might faint, and Sparkes moved around to her side of the table, easing her chair back and gently pushing her head down into her lap for a moment. She was still deathly pale when she sat back up.
“Him, you mean,” she said. “Did he hear me talk about Bella? Is that how he found her?”
There was no need for names. They both knew who “he” was. “We can’t be sure, Dawn, but we need you to think back, to try to remember who you talked to online. We’ll look on your laptop, too.”
A volunteer came in to ask Dawn a question, and seeing her tearful face, immediately started to back out. “No, please stay. Can you look after Dawn for a minute? She’s had a shock and could probably do with a cup of tea.”
Sparkes went outside and phoned Salmond.
He bagged and brought Dawn’s battered computer back to HQ while his sergeant took a statement from the devastated mother. Sparkes wanted to be in on the hunt through the sites. He wanted to be there when Bigbear, or whatever sick nursery allusion Taylor had used, popped up.
The atmosphere in the lab was fetid, a mixture of locker room and abandoned pizzas, and the technicians looked weary as they took away the machine for cataloging and mining. They were grateful there was a fraction of the activity to plow through this time, but it still took hours to produce a list of chat-room sites and contacts.
The list, when it came, was the familiar jumble of fantasy and lurid names, and Sparkes ran through them quickly to rule out the known Taylor avatars. “He must have used another name,” he told Fry.
“We got all the identities he used from his laptop, sir.”
“Are we sure he only had one laptop?”
“No sign of any others, but he was definitely using at least one Internet café. Maybe others on his travels.”
The technician sighed. “We’ll have to rule out all the ones we can and then narrow the field a bit.”
Sparkes picked up the list and headed back to Dawn Elliott’s house.
Dawn was still crying. Salmond was holding her hand and talking in a low voice. “Let’s carry on, Dawn. You’re doing brilliantly.” She turned to Sparkes. “She’s doing brilliantly, sir.”
Dawn looked up at him standing in the doorway like he had the day Bella had gone. The sense of déjà vu was uncanny.
“I’ve got a list of the people you encountered, here. Let’s look at it together to see if you remember anything.”
The rest of the house was silent. The volunteers had long gone, chased out by the sense of doom and Dawn’s distress.
She ran her finger down the names, page after page. “I didn’t know I talked to so many people,” she said.
“You probably didn’t, Dawn. People can just join a chat room and say hello and then listen.”
She paused several times, making Sparkes’s pulse jump, telling Salmond some small remembered detail—“Seagull, she lived in Brighton and wanted to know about house prices here”; “Billiejean was a big Michael Jackson fan, was always telling us about him”; “Redhead100 was looking for love. Wonder if she found it”—but most of the chat had been so mundane, Dawn had little recollection.
When she reached TDS she stopped. “Tall, Dark Stranger. I do remember him. It made me laugh when I saw his name. Such a cliché. I think we e-mailed once or twice outside the chat room. There was nothing romantic. He was nice to talk to when I felt low once, but we didn’t stay in touch.”
Sparkes went out of the room and phoned Fry. “Look for TDS. Could be him. They e-mailed outside the chat room. Text if you find anything.”
It took a while but, finally, his phone beeped. Found him was the message.
One of the forensics team was waiting to see Sparkes when he arrived for work. “We’ve found the e-mail contact between Dawn Elliott and TDS—just three e-mails, but there is mention of Bella in them.”
Sparkes wasn’t a punching-the-air kind of man, but he came close. “Next step is linking the e-mail address to Taylor, sir.”
They were also all over Dawn’s Facebook site. There were hundreds of photos of Bella on it, but Dan Fry had been brought back to the team and was searching for the images available before the kidnapping and working his way through her friends list for signs of their man.
It’s the new version of footslogging, Sparkes thought as he watched the team at work.
A weary-looking techie came to see him later that day. “Problem, sir. Dawn Elliott didn’t put any security on her Facebook page until after the little girl went missing, so anyone could have looked at her info and photos without becoming a friend.”
“Christ. Have we looked anyway?”
“Of course. Neither Glen Taylor nor any of the identities we know about appears. Odd thing is that Jean Taylor is there. She’s a friend of the Find Bella campaign.”
“Jean? Are you sure it is her?”
“Yes. Security was put on the page by then. She not only liked the page, but she posted a couple of messages.”
“Messages?”
“Yes. She told Dawn she was praying for Bella’s safe return and, later, sent a message on Bella’s fourth birthday.”
Sparkes was mystified. Why would Jean Taylor befriend Dawn Elliott? “Are we sure it’s her, not someone posing as her?”
“The e-mail address is [email protected]—one she uses, and the IP address matches her area of London. We can’t be rock solid, but it certainly points that way.”
Sparkes considered the possibilities. It could be her husband posing as her, but it was after the kidnapping. Maybe he was just making sure he heard all the info about the hunt.
“Great work. Let’s keep digging,” he told the technician, and closed his office door to get some thinking space.
He needed to talk to Glen and Jean. Separately.
FORTY
The Widow
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2010
I was doing some hand washing in the sink when Bob Sparkes knocked. I stuck my hands under the tap to rinse off the soap and then shook them dry as I walked to the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone, but Glen had put in a little camera so we could see who was on the doorstep on a video screen. “Save us wasting our time opening the door to the press, Jeanie,” he said, putting the last screw in the bracket.
I didn’t like it. It made everyone look like criminals, all distorted like in the back of a spoon, even his mum. But he insisted. I looked and saw DI Sparkes, his nose filling the screen. I pressed the intercom and asked, “Who is it?” No point making it easy for him. He sort of smiled. He knew it was a game and said, “It’s DI Bob Sparkes, Mrs. Taylor. Can we have a quick word?”
I opened the door and he was there, his face restored to normal proportions, a nice face, really. “I didn’t think I’d see you again, after the compensation settlement and everything else.”
“Well, here I am. It’s been a while. How are you both?” he said, bold as brass.
“Fine, no thanks to you, but I’m afraid Glen isn’t here, Inspector. Maybe you should call ahead next time, if you want to come back.”
“No, that’s fine. I just want to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Me? What can you possibly have to ask me? The case against Glen is closed.”
“I know, I know, but there is something I need to ask you, Jean.”
The intimacy of using my first name threw me off guard, and I told him to wipe his feet.
When he came in, he went straight into the living room—like he was family. He sat down in his usual place, and I stood in the doorway. I wasn’t going to get comfortable with him. He shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t right.
He didn’t look sorry for coming, harassing us after the courts had said it was all over. I suddenly felt frightened. Having him here was like it was starting all over again. The questions starting again. And I was afraid. Afraid he’d found something new to hound us with.